Employee share ownership in a unionised duopoly

Profit sharing schemes have been analysed assuming Cournot competition and decentralised wage negotiations, and it has been found that firms share profits in equilibrium. This paper analyses a different remuneration system: employee share ownership. We find that whether firms choose to share ownership or not depends on both the type of competition in the product market and the way in which workers organise to negotiate wages. If wage setting is decentralised, under duopolistic Cournot competition both firms share ownership. If wage setting is centralised, only one firm shares ownership if the degree to which goods are substitutes takes an intermediate value; otherwise, the two firms share ownership. In this case, if the union sets the same wage for all workers neither firm shares ownership. Therefore, centralised wage setting discourages share ownership. Fi- nally, under Bertrand competition neither firm shares ownership regardless of how workers are organised to negotiate wages.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Class dynamics of development: a methodological note

This article argues that class relations are constitutive of developmental processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. In doing so it illustrates and explains the diversity of the actually existing forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to re- vitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences

7th Drug hypersensitivity meeting: part two

No abstract availabl

Testimony of a revolutionary

Extended book review of "An impatient life: a memoir", by David Bensaïd

A biodegradable fibrin scaffold for mesenchymal stem cell transplantation.

A potential therapy to enhance healing of bone tissue is to deliver isolated mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to the site of a lesion to promote bone formation. A key issue within this technology is the development of an injectable system for the delivery of MSCs. Fibrin gel exploits the final stage of the coagulation cascade in which fibrinogen molecules are cleaved by thrombin, convert into fibrin monomers and assembled into fibrils, eventually forming fibers in a three-dimensional network. This gel could have many advantages as a cell delivery vehicle in terms of biocompatibility, biodegradation and hemostasis. The objective of this study was to explore the possibility of using fibrin gel as a delivery system for human MSCs (HMSCs). To this end we have determined the optimal fibrinogen concentrations and thrombin activity for loading HMSCs in vitro into the resultant fibrin gels to obtain cell proliferation. We found that a concentration of 18 mg/ml of fibrinogen and a thrombin activity of 100 IU/ml was optimal for producing fibrin scaffolds that would allow good HMSCs spreading and proliferation. In these conditions, cells were able to proliferate and expressed alkaline phosphatase, a bone marker, in vitro. When implanted in vivo, HMSCs were able to migrate out of the fibrin gel and invade a calcium carbonate based ceramic scaffold suggesting that fibrin gel could serve as a delivery system for HMSCs